I've certainly noticed that as we move into our mid-30s, a lot of my techie friends (who I've known since college days) are increasingly deeply unhappy with both work and home lives. Some of this might well be down to job-specific reasons such as pay, working hours, corporate culture and career advancement. But I don't think that can account for all of it.
Given that my friends have generally gone into techie jobs because they've had a passion for computing since their pre-teens, I suspect that a good deal of it is because they've eroded the barrier between "work" and "hobby". What they do for relaxation in their own time starts to look an awful lot like what they do for a living on the company clock, and the latter inevitably starts bleeding into the former. I've one friend who fought tooth and nail to break into the game design world and succeeded (getting past the entry-level QA and developer roles into one with a lot more meat to it) and who now takes no pleasure at all in actually playing games.
By contrast, I took a decision aged 16 that I wasn't going to do that. As a result, I'm in a field that I never for a moment imagined I'd end up in when I was 16, but while I can't claim that I wake up every morning brimming with enthusiasm for my job, I do generally enjoy it. The work's varied, it's intellectually challenging, being a niche (but in-demand) field the pay and conditions are fairly good and I mostly get to work no more than around 45 hours a week (with the odd exception, but I do get overtime for particular crunch periods). Plus I can go home in the evening and actually switch off from work and enjoy my hobby.
The educational establishment these days puts a lot of effort into persuading people to "follow their dreams" and "work on what interests them". I do think a more mature approach would be to help people realise that turning your hobby into your job doesn't work for everybody and that there's work of interest in a lot of fields if you're prepared to look for it.
How is it possible to take 20 pages to say so little that is actually meaningful? It basically boils down to "newer and/or lower performance components draw less power". No shit, Sherlock.
It's also rather misinformed when it comes to the availability of power-consumption information for gaming PC components. My current PC is a self-built gaming PC and I can assure you that when I was putting it together, power consumption information was absolutely something I looked at, because it affected my choice of PSU. And if you go to the manufacturers' websites, power consumption information is usually available upfront. If it's not, or if you want to know how it varies depending on loads, then there are any number of testing, benchmarking and review sites just a google search away.
There is probably an interesting article that could be written about minimising power consumption in a gaming PC, but it's not this one. In reality, power consumption is one aspect of a sensitive series of trade-offs. On graphics cards, for instance, you get get the same brute-force performance from AMD cards as you can from Nvidia cards at (usually) a much lower price - but the trade-off comes in heat and power consumption. So you can base your decision on a balance between how much you care about the up-front purchase costs of the card, vs ongoing power costs, potentially the cost of a new PSU and the noise/discomfort factor of having something that burns with the heat of a billion fiery suns in your PC. Most people building gaming PCs are not blind to this stuff.
The article reads like a lightweight piece of political advocacy for more regulation, trying to solve a problem which increasingly doesn't exist (the general trend over time is towards more power-efficient components and electricity prices act as a further restraint). So the author can, to be blunt, fuck right off.
The "mom and pop" sites point rings amusingly true for me.
Around a year ago, my dad went through a wave of really nasty malware infections. The ones that block your AV software, redirect your DNS and generally embed themselves right across the OS.
Now, my dad has historically been a bit of a malware-magnet. He falls into the category of "knows just about enough to think he knows everything", which used to lead him into some really poor security practices. But after a really nasty infection in 2012 which resulted in him losing quite a significant chunk of personal data, I thought he'd finally learned his lesson. He was keeping on top of Windows Update, keeping an updated AVG install, running weekly Malwarebytes scans and had finally, finally, stopped opening dodgy e-mail attachments from his perpetually-malware-infested dickhead golf-buddy friends.
I'd also put him on an adblocker. I wasn't using one myself at the time (though I am now), but I was sick of making the 4-hour-each-way journey to his place to fix his machine, so I'd held nothing back.
So a wave of four or five infections in the space of a month came as a bit of a shock. What was surprising was that he was getting re-infected very quickly after each disinfection (including one which involved a full format-reinstall of Windows).
Eventually, after going through his browser history after two consecutive infections (and half-expecting to find a megaton of pr0n), I track down the source.
And it's not pr0n, it's his bloody family history club website. Some online forum he participates in for people who are trying to trace their ancestry in a particular area. It has under 50 regular participants. It also has a prominent notice about how much the site depends on advertising income to stay in operation and asking users to disable or make an exception in their adblocker (with instructions on how to do so).
My dad has, of course, been making an exception for this site, which is then pushing a remarkably concentrated and toxic cocktail of malware-infested ads almost every time it is accessed. We actually ended up on the phone to the guy who ran the site, begging him to switch to another advertising provider. He wasn't exactly enthusiastic, so the adblocker remained in place. Don't know where things have got to since then.
Actually, I don't detest ads per se. I held off for using an adblocker for a long time, because there were a few sites I frequented that I knew were unlikely to be able to stay in operation on anything other than the advertising model. Static-image ads or even tastefully animated ones (ie. a selection of items from a product range which changes every 20 seconds or so) don't bother me, provided they don't fill half the screen.
But I'm on an adblocker now, as of around 9 months ago. Malvertising was a factor in this move, but the biggest factor were auto-playing video-ads with sound. I got bored of clicking through browser tabs playing the game of "spot where the noise is coming from". Oh, and those full-site wrap-around ads that leave almost no room on the screen where you can click-for-focus without clicking the ad are infuriating as well.
This is an industry that seems set for self-destruction. I've no doubt that there are responsible, legitimate advertising firms out there, as described by the GP (I still see plenty of "inoffensive" ads). There are also, as I said above, a lot of useful resources that would either require subscriptions or shut down without advertising. But it doesn't take many bad apples to sour the public on the whole idea. Adblockers are getting traction even with people who were uncomfortable with them to begin with on ethical grounds (like me) and from what we've seen out of the courts so far, they're not getting banned any time soon (and the growth of malvertising makes this even more of an unlikely prospect).
I suspect the onus is going to be on the industry to sort this out, through creating a trade association with some real teeth and buy-in from the major customers, plus potentially co-operation with search engines to help identify dodgy sites.
All of which is probably a recipe for a cartel 10 years down the line. Solve one problem and another replaces it...
I had to deal with an issue relating to a number of members of the public claiming to be affected by this a couple of years ago. Bluntly, most of the people involved had clear mental health or personality issues and were projecting their general dislike of modern life and technology onto this supposed bogeyman.
A couple turned out to be more interesting; they'd started feeling unwell since having wireless routers installed in their homes. Turned out that a faulty batch of router power supplies was emitting a high pitched whine that some people were sensitive to, with symptoms including loss of sleep, headaches and nausea. The problems with this router batch (though not the specific issue I was involved in) attracted some reporting in the tech press: here.
Nothing to do with wireless signals, but everything to do with what was, essentially, one of those teenager-repellent "stingers" being installed in their homes.
There is indeed an opt-out, described about halfway down TFA. If you opt out, then you don't get the subscriber benefit of the faster connection when accessing via other people's routers. BT have had a similar system in place for a couple of years now.
I'm a Virgin Media subscriber and I'll be opting out. So long as the opt-out remains in place, however, I won't be getting too upset about this.
You're not wrong as such, but it's a little bit more complicated than that. The truth is that neither the hub-and-spoke model nor the point-to-point model has "won" right now and it's likely that both are going to continue side-by-side for many years to come.
A bigger issue is that a lot of the airlines who are pursuing the hub-and-spoke model have nevertheless stayed away from the A380 and 747-800 (some have dabbled, but with small purchases). It's a rare route where, even operating out of a major hub, you can fill an aircraft that large multiple times per day. There are a few, sure (London - New York, for instance), but those are the exception rather than the norm.
Emirates are clearly trying to make the A380 a cornerstone of their Dubai hub strategy and part of their brand. But Emirates has a distinctive financial situation, with very deep pockets behind it and a strategy that's currently about buying market share rather than making profits. I don't know where that will end up in the longer term (particularly if low oil prices are here to stay for a decade or so).
It depends which model of the 747 you're on. There's a big difference in terms of noise and vibration between a 747-400 and a 747-800. They may look very similar from outside, but there are massive differences in engines, as well as substantial refinements to the airframe on the later models.
The current trend in the airline sector seems to be away from the very large aircraft. The A380 is tanking in sales terms (only Emirates has really plunged into that market) and there's talk that Airbus might look to drop the line sooner rather than later. The 747-800 is also finding things slow going. The hot sellers right now in the wide-bodied aircraft stakes seem to be the 777, 787 and A350.
The problem with those ultra-large aircraft is that they can be thirsty in terms of fuel, crew-intensive and, except on a small number of really "thick" routes, quite hard to fill. With the airline business mostly operating on quite thin margins, efficiency matters and the smaller, single-deck planes are looking better in that regard right now.
Plus the A380 requires specialised ground infrastructure at airports for efficient operation, which translates into limited operational flexibility and/or higher landing charges. Also its Code-F designation means that in theory, it requires runway/taxiway widths and separations etc to be built to higher standards (though many airports are using derogations for this right now).
The ultra-large aircraft may yet make a comeback, of course, but if they do, it's more likely to be a currently under-developed market where new very "thick" routes spring up (eg. domestic connections between Chinese cities).
Amen to that - especially where moderation is allowed on threads where the user is also posting.
I once had a conversation with the editor of a site that used that system. He knew how broken it was as a means of managing discussion, but said that their metrics showed that it produced the highest number of page-views. There's a certain class of user that goes elsewhere when they aren't allowed to downvote at will (and it is downvoting that is the draw, not upvoting).
It's largely about page views and gathering metrics for advertising. For instance, if a newspaper site uses a general forum, then it is difficult to track how much users are engaging with specific authors/articles. With comments under the article, however, there is a direct and easily understood metric for how a specific author, article or topic gets the readers agitated.
The UK's Daily Telegraph (once one of the finest newspapers in the English-speaking world, now much diminished) is known for being particularly brutal in ranking its journalists according to the number of comments their stories create. This, in turn, puts an incentive on journalists to produce more politically-extreme copy, as they know it will result in a stronger reaction.
Meanwhile The Independent, another notable UK newspaper (albeit one with less history behind it), has gone for the practice of heading all of its stories with clickbait-style headlines.
You won't believe this one neat trick for ruining fine journalistic traditions that insurance companies don't want you to know and you'll never guess the 14 most popular theories on what happens next.
I'm entirely with you. I think the consequence of what GP was suggesting would be to drag all participating forums down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
I've a lot of sympathy. Some sites - like Slashdot - are all about the comments (for which the stories act as little more than a prompt). But those sites tend to have well-throught-through community structures and moderations in place. Much as we all gripe about Slashdot sometimes, its moderation system remains best-in-class.
A lot of other sites I frequent have been "going toxic" over the last couple of years, often as a result of their comments sections (I'll highlight Eurogamer and Kotaku as partial examples and Animenewsnetwork as an uber-example). The comments threads usually descend into two (or sometimes more) camps of people, yelling "SJW!" or "MRA!" at each other. Over time, the site's editors and authors get pulled into one side or the other and the site stops playing for a general audience and just becomes another factional advocacy site.
Blocking comments therefore makes a degree of sense for sites which want to preserve the quality of their writing but which don't have the resources (or a sufficiently engaged readership) to make Slashdot-style community moderation work. It's actually pretty admirable in some respects, because it is actually incurring an immediate financial penalty for the site, assuming its business model is advertising based. After all, if somebody reads a story once, you get a single page-view. If they reload the story two dozen times to participate in a flame war in the comments, that's two dozen page-views. Indeed, it's hard to read some articles on the sites I mentioned above (and many more besides) and see them as anything other than flamebait designed to encourage high page-view wars in the comments.
You can always find edge-cases, but your friend's situation is pretty unusual these days.
Plus my experience of "Let's Play" videos is that their real purpose is to allow children to vicariously experience age-restricted games that they can't buy in the stores. In the past, if a child's own parent wouldn't buy them an age-restricted game, they'd go to a friend's house and play it there. Stores are getting much better at informing parents and enforcing age ratings these days - so the new get-around is youtube.
There are a few things behind the decline in split-screen gaming on consoles.
Demographics have changed a lot. Until the latter part of the PS2/Xbox cycle, console gaming (with a small handful of exceptions) meant getting a bunch of people into the same room at the same time. That was ok as far as it went; a huge chunk of the gaming demographic back then was the teenager and young-adult market, with ready availability of siblings or housemates to provide the players. Those players are still the most important purchasing demographic, but they're older now. Split-screen gaming for them is a "special occasions" thing now, while online gaming is there for them whenever they feel like it.
Gamers are also a lot more intolerant of poor framerates than was the case in the past. Split-screen gaming usually involves a big hit to framerate and many classic split-screen games (including the early Halo titles) made enormous compromises in this area. Ever since the Call of Duty series started making a big selling point out of its 60fps gaming, there's been a lot more focus on framerates. For those about to cry "graphical snobbery!" - the difference in responsiveness and feel between a console shooter running at a steady 60fps and one running at either a steady 30fps or, worse still, a variable framerate is huge. PC gamers might not appreciate this, since they're used to having a lot more control in this area. But one of the big reasons why the Call of Duty series made it so big on consoles (despite seeming tame and unambitious to PC gamers) is that it just feels so much more responsive than the competition. With split-screen shooters often having provided a sub-20fps experience, the market for them now is likely much diminished.
There's also the point that more multiplayer games these days make a big point out of persistent stats systems. Look at a modern online shooter and you will often find a bewildering array of level-up systems, perks, bounties and other meta-game components. Those are geared towards online players putting in dozens of hours, not to quick-blast couch-parties.
So basically, while there is a small but vocal community that desperately wants split-screen gaming, there are understandable business reasons that have led to it being sidelined and gradually eliminated.
I've crossed paths with the CBI a number of times in a work context over the last decade and a bit. To be honest, I've never seen anything come out of them that wasn't either a) blindingly obvious or b) completely stupid.
They're a bit of an artifact from another age, really. They were founded in mid-1960s, at a time when UK Governments tended to be much more hostile to business and often at the beck and call of the trades unions. The CBI was set up as a counter-point to that; to act, as it were, for a union for big business. And to be fair, that was a perfectly valid objective in the circumstances of the times and remained so throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Today, of course, British business is hardly cowering from the union menace and the CBI, like a lot of other institutions of the cold war era, is left without a clear purpose. With a divided and often disinterested membership, it mostly seems to exist largely only to perpetuate its own existence, which it does by making ponderous announcements on whatever vaguely business-related issue happens to be topical at the time. As I said above, sometimes it points out the obvious, sometimes it says something ridiculous.
It would be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that, for legacy reasons, it still commands more press attention than it deserves. It can be an absolute godsend for lazy BBC journalists who can't be bothered going out to talk to actual industry; get a CBI rent-a-quote to say something and present it as the voice of business on any given story.
They eked out profits in the N64 and Gamecube generations despite generally poor sales by keeping unit costs down and managing good first party sales.
They basically won the lottery with the Wii - between the quick-fix appeal of Wii-Sports, a very friendly media narrative (portraying them as the plucky underdog) and some well timed first party exclusives in the first 2-3 years of its lifespan, they made an unfeasible amount of money, most of which they banked.
Since then, their luck has run out and their output has generally disappointed. From the last 2-3 years of the Wii's life-span, through the Wii-U's launch and into the present, their gaming activities have generally been loss-making (sometimes startlingly so). However, they've been doing a lot of currency trading on the side, which has meant that some years/quarters they have shown an overall profit based on that. Just as pre-bailout General Motors was sometimes described as a pension fund that made some cars on the side, Nintendo has somewhat become a currency-trading house that makes a few games on the side. For the time being, they aren't going anywhere (and the Amiibo range has given their gaming revenues a boost, though this looks set to be temporary).
The longer term future for the company is more clouded. They've been able to sit on the takings from the early part of the Wii generation for a long time, at least in part because they've been paying out very small dividends to shareholders. The longer term risk is that shareholders will start to wonder what exactly is going on with the management of a company that is sat on a huge pile of cash, but not particularly good at earning more of it.
Shareholder revolts are generally rare in Japan (which hasn't really had a true Eisner-moment yet), but there are already signs of discontent coming out of reports of their shareholder conference calls. Their hesitant move into the mobile gaming market is almost certainly a reluctant sop to shareholder pressure.
I think GP's point is more serious than you're acknowledging. The great selling point of Windows and the reason so many users at the bottom end of the IT-literacy scale cling to it, is the "just works" factor.
Since a year or so into the lifespan of XP (and maybe with a short wobble at the launch of Vista), Windows has done a good job of "just working" for that low-end user. You could give your grandmother a PC, turn on automatic updates for the OS and the antivirus, warn her that it would want a restart once a week or so and then essentially just "fire and forget". Until and unless something went wrong on the hardware front (or granny had a previously unknown predilection for warez or pr0n), you were unlikely to have any significant problems.
(The more difficult users were those - like my dad - who knew just enough to be dangerous.)
But I've definitely noticed a pattern, since the start of the year (aligning, as others have told me, with MS sacking the QA department) of Windows updates breaking things in fairly fundamental ways. That is eating fairly heavily into Windows's "just works" advantage. As the philosophy behind Windows 10 seems to be that the low-end users get to the the beta testers/guinea pigs for the enterprise customers, I can see this problem getting worse rather than better. MS are (much as they did with Xbox and the dilution of the Windows gaming focus) undermining one of the strongest pillars that props up Windows dominance of the home desktop market.
There have been any number of problems on Windows 7 in the last couple of months. In particular, KB3035583 (the update that pushes out the "upgrade to Windows 10" button and background-installer) has been causing a lot of issues for some users. In some cases, it's leading to Windows Update and the associated services going crazy in terms of CPU load and HDD access for 30+ minutes after booting. In other cases, it's even being linked to corrupted system files.
That's the most serious one I'm aware of at the moment, but there have been a good number of other horrors since the start of 2015, inflicting anything from infinite-reboot-loops to corrupted video playback on users unlucky enough to have the wrong hardware/software combinations.
MS's update testing seems to have gone to hell lately. In many respects, I am quite tempted by the free update to Win 10 Pro I'm eligible for, but the mandatory updates thing (even if Pro lets you defer them for a while) is putting me off. The fact that they stagger how long you can put off the upgrade based on whether you are Enterprise, Pro, Home or "amnesty" (the less favoured you are, the shorter the time you can delay updates) seems a pretty clear indication that MS now sees its customers as beta testers.
To some extent, yes. But I think the worst of the big "rush to freemium" might have passed now. Certainly, traditional gaming companies like EA and Crytek who invested heavily in the model have found the results from it disappointing. Meanwhile, the mobile gaming companies like King who made it big on the back of mobile mega-hits have found it difficult to replicate the success of their big-name games and are generally downsizing.
There are parts of the industry where freemium is working; League of Legends, which has a particularly benign version of the model, is a huge success and will remain so for the foreseeable future. A few failing MMOs, such as Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic have managed to extend their lives by moving partially or fully to a freemium model. But in general, the pendulum in most of the gaming world seems to be swinging away from freemium right now (though sadly, buy-to-own games with pay-to-win elements like Forza 5 don't seem to be going away). The mobile gaming ecosystems are not in a happy place due to over-saturation of the markets and low standards, which console and PC gamers have gotten a bit savvier over the last couple of years and have generally realised that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The exceptions to all of this are in Asia. Much of Japan's gaming industry is rapidly decoupling from the wider global industry (Sony, Nintendo and, to a lesser extent, Square-Enix being the exceptions). But the only forms of gaming in good health at the moment are childrens' games (primarily buy-to-own and on handheld platforms), otaku games (some freemium, some buy-to-own-but-pay-to-win on home console and handheld platforms) and salaryman/woman-focussed pay-to-win mobile games, designed to be played in short bursts on a commute. The commute is, unfortunately, more or less the only time that a Japanese adult with a full time job has for gaming, given their ridiculous working hours culture, so the freemium model sits more naturally there.
China's the other exception. There's simply less stigma there about buying your way to success and the majority of their online games in particular are explicitly built around the fact that whoever spends the most on in-game items will have a huge advantage in the game. Everybody there seems to be ok with that (likely for a massively complicated web of social and cultural factors), but it makes my blood run cold.
It was the autoplaying video-adverts that flipped me over (about 6 months ago). I tolerated them when they first appeared, but once they defaulted to having the sound switched on, it was clear that the situation had gone beyond reasonable bounds.
The advertising industry should do whatever it can to make life unpleasant for those companies that rolled out those noisy monsters. I was prepared to tolerate ads up to that point, so that particular development has cost the industry a good few ad-views (and I doubt I'm alone in having found the game of "which browser tab is making the noise" to be my breaking point).
The grinding out of expansions was part of what lost me. Having all progress essentially reset every time a new expansion came out took away a lot of the "persistent world" thing that MMOs are supposed to do. A faster expansion cycle will do nothing to solve that problem, unless they stop raising the level cap (which they won't).
WoW does seem to be in rapid decline now; there's even talk that its player numbers could cross-over with Final Fantasy XIV's at some point in the next 12 months, which would be the first time in a decade that WoW would not have been the largest subscription MMO in the world.
Personally, I dabbled with vanilla played hardcore from early TBC through to late Lich King and came back casual for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I was driven out of hardcore raiding partly by the time-commitment and partly by the constant fucking around with classes and specs by Blizzard, sometimes for multiplayer balance (which I didn't give a shit about) and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. It took any sense of player-agency out of the game. I was driven out of casual play by the massive, overwhelming grind of tedious daily quests that Pandaria used to gate off access to even its casual-oriented endgame content.
I never bought Warlords and, from what I've heard from my one acquaintance who still plays, I missed next to nothing.
WoW won't "die" any time soon. Chances are, Blizzard will still be able to keep it profitable at 500,000 players, if they scale back their investment in development. But if Blizzard want to achieve MMO dominance again, they need an entirely new product now. WoW may not be dying, but it is yesterday's news. Even if you want a straightforward, traditional MMO, Square-Enix are just more competent at delivering that these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly not. Don't let the facts stand in the way of your grumpy-old-fart prejudices, though.
I've certainly noticed that as we move into our mid-30s, a lot of my techie friends (who I've known since college days) are increasingly deeply unhappy with both work and home lives. Some of this might well be down to job-specific reasons such as pay, working hours, corporate culture and career advancement. But I don't think that can account for all of it.
Given that my friends have generally gone into techie jobs because they've had a passion for computing since their pre-teens, I suspect that a good deal of it is because they've eroded the barrier between "work" and "hobby". What they do for relaxation in their own time starts to look an awful lot like what they do for a living on the company clock, and the latter inevitably starts bleeding into the former. I've one friend who fought tooth and nail to break into the game design world and succeeded (getting past the entry-level QA and developer roles into one with a lot more meat to it) and who now takes no pleasure at all in actually playing games.
By contrast, I took a decision aged 16 that I wasn't going to do that. As a result, I'm in a field that I never for a moment imagined I'd end up in when I was 16, but while I can't claim that I wake up every morning brimming with enthusiasm for my job, I do generally enjoy it. The work's varied, it's intellectually challenging, being a niche (but in-demand) field the pay and conditions are fairly good and I mostly get to work no more than around 45 hours a week (with the odd exception, but I do get overtime for particular crunch periods). Plus I can go home in the evening and actually switch off from work and enjoy my hobby.
The educational establishment these days puts a lot of effort into persuading people to "follow their dreams" and "work on what interests them". I do think a more mature approach would be to help people realise that turning your hobby into your job doesn't work for everybody and that there's work of interest in a lot of fields if you're prepared to look for it.
How is it possible to take 20 pages to say so little that is actually meaningful? It basically boils down to "newer and/or lower performance components draw less power". No shit, Sherlock.
It's also rather misinformed when it comes to the availability of power-consumption information for gaming PC components. My current PC is a self-built gaming PC and I can assure you that when I was putting it together, power consumption information was absolutely something I looked at, because it affected my choice of PSU. And if you go to the manufacturers' websites, power consumption information is usually available upfront. If it's not, or if you want to know how it varies depending on loads, then there are any number of testing, benchmarking and review sites just a google search away.
There is probably an interesting article that could be written about minimising power consumption in a gaming PC, but it's not this one. In reality, power consumption is one aspect of a sensitive series of trade-offs. On graphics cards, for instance, you get get the same brute-force performance from AMD cards as you can from Nvidia cards at (usually) a much lower price - but the trade-off comes in heat and power consumption. So you can base your decision on a balance between how much you care about the up-front purchase costs of the card, vs ongoing power costs, potentially the cost of a new PSU and the noise/discomfort factor of having something that burns with the heat of a billion fiery suns in your PC. Most people building gaming PCs are not blind to this stuff.
The article reads like a lightweight piece of political advocacy for more regulation, trying to solve a problem which increasingly doesn't exist (the general trend over time is towards more power-efficient components and electricity prices act as a further restraint). So the author can, to be blunt, fuck right off.
The "mom and pop" sites point rings amusingly true for me.
Around a year ago, my dad went through a wave of really nasty malware infections. The ones that block your AV software, redirect your DNS and generally embed themselves right across the OS.
Now, my dad has historically been a bit of a malware-magnet. He falls into the category of "knows just about enough to think he knows everything", which used to lead him into some really poor security practices. But after a really nasty infection in 2012 which resulted in him losing quite a significant chunk of personal data, I thought he'd finally learned his lesson. He was keeping on top of Windows Update, keeping an updated AVG install, running weekly Malwarebytes scans and had finally, finally, stopped opening dodgy e-mail attachments from his perpetually-malware-infested dickhead golf-buddy friends.
I'd also put him on an adblocker. I wasn't using one myself at the time (though I am now), but I was sick of making the 4-hour-each-way journey to his place to fix his machine, so I'd held nothing back.
So a wave of four or five infections in the space of a month came as a bit of a shock. What was surprising was that he was getting re-infected very quickly after each disinfection (including one which involved a full format-reinstall of Windows).
Eventually, after going through his browser history after two consecutive infections (and half-expecting to find a megaton of pr0n), I track down the source.
And it's not pr0n, it's his bloody family history club website. Some online forum he participates in for people who are trying to trace their ancestry in a particular area. It has under 50 regular participants. It also has a prominent notice about how much the site depends on advertising income to stay in operation and asking users to disable or make an exception in their adblocker (with instructions on how to do so).
My dad has, of course, been making an exception for this site, which is then pushing a remarkably concentrated and toxic cocktail of malware-infested ads almost every time it is accessed. We actually ended up on the phone to the guy who ran the site, begging him to switch to another advertising provider. He wasn't exactly enthusiastic, so the adblocker remained in place. Don't know where things have got to since then.
Actually, I don't detest ads per se. I held off for using an adblocker for a long time, because there were a few sites I frequented that I knew were unlikely to be able to stay in operation on anything other than the advertising model. Static-image ads or even tastefully animated ones (ie. a selection of items from a product range which changes every 20 seconds or so) don't bother me, provided they don't fill half the screen.
But I'm on an adblocker now, as of around 9 months ago. Malvertising was a factor in this move, but the biggest factor were auto-playing video-ads with sound. I got bored of clicking through browser tabs playing the game of "spot where the noise is coming from". Oh, and those full-site wrap-around ads that leave almost no room on the screen where you can click-for-focus without clicking the ad are infuriating as well.
This is an industry that seems set for self-destruction. I've no doubt that there are responsible, legitimate advertising firms out there, as described by the GP (I still see plenty of "inoffensive" ads). There are also, as I said above, a lot of useful resources that would either require subscriptions or shut down without advertising. But it doesn't take many bad apples to sour the public on the whole idea. Adblockers are getting traction even with people who were uncomfortable with them to begin with on ethical grounds (like me) and from what we've seen out of the courts so far, they're not getting banned any time soon (and the growth of malvertising makes this even more of an unlikely prospect).
I suspect the onus is going to be on the industry to sort this out, through creating a trade association with some real teeth and buy-in from the major customers, plus potentially co-operation with search engines to help identify dodgy sites.
All of which is probably a recipe for a cartel 10 years down the line. Solve one problem and another replaces it...
I had to deal with an issue relating to a number of members of the public claiming to be affected by this a couple of years ago. Bluntly, most of the people involved had clear mental health or personality issues and were projecting their general dislike of modern life and technology onto this supposed bogeyman.
A couple turned out to be more interesting; they'd started feeling unwell since having wireless routers installed in their homes. Turned out that a faulty batch of router power supplies was emitting a high pitched whine that some people were sensitive to, with symptoms including loss of sleep, headaches and nausea. The problems with this router batch (though not the specific issue I was involved in) attracted some reporting in the tech press: here.
Nothing to do with wireless signals, but everything to do with what was, essentially, one of those teenager-repellent "stingers" being installed in their homes.
There is indeed an opt-out, described about halfway down TFA. If you opt out, then you don't get the subscriber benefit of the faster connection when accessing via other people's routers. BT have had a similar system in place for a couple of years now.
I'm a Virgin Media subscriber and I'll be opting out. So long as the opt-out remains in place, however, I won't be getting too upset about this.
The issue is more that if oil prices remain low, the people behind Emirates might find that they have rather less cash to pump into their airline.
You're not wrong as such, but it's a little bit more complicated than that. The truth is that neither the hub-and-spoke model nor the point-to-point model has "won" right now and it's likely that both are going to continue side-by-side for many years to come.
A bigger issue is that a lot of the airlines who are pursuing the hub-and-spoke model have nevertheless stayed away from the A380 and 747-800 (some have dabbled, but with small purchases). It's a rare route where, even operating out of a major hub, you can fill an aircraft that large multiple times per day. There are a few, sure (London - New York, for instance), but those are the exception rather than the norm.
Emirates are clearly trying to make the A380 a cornerstone of their Dubai hub strategy and part of their brand. But Emirates has a distinctive financial situation, with very deep pockets behind it and a strategy that's currently about buying market share rather than making profits. I don't know where that will end up in the longer term (particularly if low oil prices are here to stay for a decade or so).
It depends which model of the 747 you're on. There's a big difference in terms of noise and vibration between a 747-400 and a 747-800. They may look very similar from outside, but there are massive differences in engines, as well as substantial refinements to the airframe on the later models.
The current trend in the airline sector seems to be away from the very large aircraft. The A380 is tanking in sales terms (only Emirates has really plunged into that market) and there's talk that Airbus might look to drop the line sooner rather than later. The 747-800 is also finding things slow going. The hot sellers right now in the wide-bodied aircraft stakes seem to be the 777, 787 and A350.
The problem with those ultra-large aircraft is that they can be thirsty in terms of fuel, crew-intensive and, except on a small number of really "thick" routes, quite hard to fill. With the airline business mostly operating on quite thin margins, efficiency matters and the smaller, single-deck planes are looking better in that regard right now.
Plus the A380 requires specialised ground infrastructure at airports for efficient operation, which translates into limited operational flexibility and/or higher landing charges. Also its Code-F designation means that in theory, it requires runway/taxiway widths and separations etc to be built to higher standards (though many airports are using derogations for this right now).
The ultra-large aircraft may yet make a comeback, of course, but if they do, it's more likely to be a currently under-developed market where new very "thick" routes spring up (eg. domestic connections between Chinese cities).
Amen to that - especially where moderation is allowed on threads where the user is also posting.
I once had a conversation with the editor of a site that used that system. He knew how broken it was as a means of managing discussion, but said that their metrics showed that it produced the highest number of page-views. There's a certain class of user that goes elsewhere when they aren't allowed to downvote at will (and it is downvoting that is the draw, not upvoting).
It's largely about page views and gathering metrics for advertising. For instance, if a newspaper site uses a general forum, then it is difficult to track how much users are engaging with specific authors/articles. With comments under the article, however, there is a direct and easily understood metric for how a specific author, article or topic gets the readers agitated.
The UK's Daily Telegraph (once one of the finest newspapers in the English-speaking world, now much diminished) is known for being particularly brutal in ranking its journalists according to the number of comments their stories create. This, in turn, puts an incentive on journalists to produce more politically-extreme copy, as they know it will result in a stronger reaction.
Meanwhile The Independent, another notable UK newspaper (albeit one with less history behind it), has gone for the practice of heading all of its stories with clickbait-style headlines.
You won't believe this one neat trick for ruining fine journalistic traditions that insurance companies don't want you to know and you'll never guess the 14 most popular theories on what happens next.
I'm entirely with you. I think the consequence of what GP was suggesting would be to drag all participating forums down to the level of the lowest common denominator.
I've a lot of sympathy. Some sites - like Slashdot - are all about the comments (for which the stories act as little more than a prompt). But those sites tend to have well-throught-through community structures and moderations in place. Much as we all gripe about Slashdot sometimes, its moderation system remains best-in-class.
A lot of other sites I frequent have been "going toxic" over the last couple of years, often as a result of their comments sections (I'll highlight Eurogamer and Kotaku as partial examples and Animenewsnetwork as an uber-example). The comments threads usually descend into two (or sometimes more) camps of people, yelling "SJW!" or "MRA!" at each other. Over time, the site's editors and authors get pulled into one side or the other and the site stops playing for a general audience and just becomes another factional advocacy site.
Blocking comments therefore makes a degree of sense for sites which want to preserve the quality of their writing but which don't have the resources (or a sufficiently engaged readership) to make Slashdot-style community moderation work. It's actually pretty admirable in some respects, because it is actually incurring an immediate financial penalty for the site, assuming its business model is advertising based. After all, if somebody reads a story once, you get a single page-view. If they reload the story two dozen times to participate in a flame war in the comments, that's two dozen page-views. Indeed, it's hard to read some articles on the sites I mentioned above (and many more besides) and see them as anything other than flamebait designed to encourage high page-view wars in the comments.
You can always find edge-cases, but your friend's situation is pretty unusual these days.
Plus my experience of "Let's Play" videos is that their real purpose is to allow children to vicariously experience age-restricted games that they can't buy in the stores. In the past, if a child's own parent wouldn't buy them an age-restricted game, they'd go to a friend's house and play it there. Stores are getting much better at informing parents and enforcing age ratings these days - so the new get-around is youtube.
There are a few things behind the decline in split-screen gaming on consoles.
Demographics have changed a lot. Until the latter part of the PS2/Xbox cycle, console gaming (with a small handful of exceptions) meant getting a bunch of people into the same room at the same time. That was ok as far as it went; a huge chunk of the gaming demographic back then was the teenager and young-adult market, with ready availability of siblings or housemates to provide the players. Those players are still the most important purchasing demographic, but they're older now. Split-screen gaming for them is a "special occasions" thing now, while online gaming is there for them whenever they feel like it.
Gamers are also a lot more intolerant of poor framerates than was the case in the past. Split-screen gaming usually involves a big hit to framerate and many classic split-screen games (including the early Halo titles) made enormous compromises in this area. Ever since the Call of Duty series started making a big selling point out of its 60fps gaming, there's been a lot more focus on framerates. For those about to cry "graphical snobbery!" - the difference in responsiveness and feel between a console shooter running at a steady 60fps and one running at either a steady 30fps or, worse still, a variable framerate is huge. PC gamers might not appreciate this, since they're used to having a lot more control in this area. But one of the big reasons why the Call of Duty series made it so big on consoles (despite seeming tame and unambitious to PC gamers) is that it just feels so much more responsive than the competition. With split-screen shooters often having provided a sub-20fps experience, the market for them now is likely much diminished.
There's also the point that more multiplayer games these days make a big point out of persistent stats systems. Look at a modern online shooter and you will often find a bewildering array of level-up systems, perks, bounties and other meta-game components. Those are geared towards online players putting in dozens of hours, not to quick-blast couch-parties.
So basically, while there is a small but vocal community that desperately wants split-screen gaming, there are understandable business reasons that have led to it being sidelined and gradually eliminated.
I've crossed paths with the CBI a number of times in a work context over the last decade and a bit. To be honest, I've never seen anything come out of them that wasn't either a) blindingly obvious or b) completely stupid.
They're a bit of an artifact from another age, really. They were founded in mid-1960s, at a time when UK Governments tended to be much more hostile to business and often at the beck and call of the trades unions. The CBI was set up as a counter-point to that; to act, as it were, for a union for big business. And to be fair, that was a perfectly valid objective in the circumstances of the times and remained so throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Today, of course, British business is hardly cowering from the union menace and the CBI, like a lot of other institutions of the cold war era, is left without a clear purpose. With a divided and often disinterested membership, it mostly seems to exist largely only to perpetuate its own existence, which it does by making ponderous announcements on whatever vaguely business-related issue happens to be topical at the time. As I said above, sometimes it points out the obvious, sometimes it says something ridiculous.
It would be harmless enough if it weren't for the fact that, for legacy reasons, it still commands more press attention than it deserves. It can be an absolute godsend for lazy BBC journalists who can't be bothered going out to talk to actual industry; get a CBI rent-a-quote to say something and present it as the voice of business on any given story.
They eked out profits in the N64 and Gamecube generations despite generally poor sales by keeping unit costs down and managing good first party sales.
They basically won the lottery with the Wii - between the quick-fix appeal of Wii-Sports, a very friendly media narrative (portraying them as the plucky underdog) and some well timed first party exclusives in the first 2-3 years of its lifespan, they made an unfeasible amount of money, most of which they banked.
Since then, their luck has run out and their output has generally disappointed. From the last 2-3 years of the Wii's life-span, through the Wii-U's launch and into the present, their gaming activities have generally been loss-making (sometimes startlingly so). However, they've been doing a lot of currency trading on the side, which has meant that some years/quarters they have shown an overall profit based on that. Just as pre-bailout General Motors was sometimes described as a pension fund that made some cars on the side, Nintendo has somewhat become a currency-trading house that makes a few games on the side. For the time being, they aren't going anywhere (and the Amiibo range has given their gaming revenues a boost, though this looks set to be temporary).
The longer term future for the company is more clouded. They've been able to sit on the takings from the early part of the Wii generation for a long time, at least in part because they've been paying out very small dividends to shareholders. The longer term risk is that shareholders will start to wonder what exactly is going on with the management of a company that is sat on a huge pile of cash, but not particularly good at earning more of it.
Shareholder revolts are generally rare in Japan (which hasn't really had a true Eisner-moment yet), but there are already signs of discontent coming out of reports of their shareholder conference calls. Their hesitant move into the mobile gaming market is almost certainly a reluctant sop to shareholder pressure.
I think GP's point is more serious than you're acknowledging. The great selling point of Windows and the reason so many users at the bottom end of the IT-literacy scale cling to it, is the "just works" factor.
Since a year or so into the lifespan of XP (and maybe with a short wobble at the launch of Vista), Windows has done a good job of "just working" for that low-end user. You could give your grandmother a PC, turn on automatic updates for the OS and the antivirus, warn her that it would want a restart once a week or so and then essentially just "fire and forget". Until and unless something went wrong on the hardware front (or granny had a previously unknown predilection for warez or pr0n), you were unlikely to have any significant problems.
(The more difficult users were those - like my dad - who knew just enough to be dangerous.)
But I've definitely noticed a pattern, since the start of the year (aligning, as others have told me, with MS sacking the QA department) of Windows updates breaking things in fairly fundamental ways. That is eating fairly heavily into Windows's "just works" advantage. As the philosophy behind Windows 10 seems to be that the low-end users get to the the beta testers/guinea pigs for the enterprise customers, I can see this problem getting worse rather than better. MS are (much as they did with Xbox and the dilution of the Windows gaming focus) undermining one of the strongest pillars that props up Windows dominance of the home desktop market.
The first thing I do on sitting down in front of a clean Windows install is to make it look as much like Win2k as possible.
Always was my favourite version in terms of UI, though I fully accept that I might just be odd and/or broken.
There have been any number of problems on Windows 7 in the last couple of months. In particular, KB3035583 (the update that pushes out the "upgrade to Windows 10" button and background-installer) has been causing a lot of issues for some users. In some cases, it's leading to Windows Update and the associated services going crazy in terms of CPU load and HDD access for 30+ minutes after booting. In other cases, it's even being linked to corrupted system files.
That's the most serious one I'm aware of at the moment, but there have been a good number of other horrors since the start of 2015, inflicting anything from infinite-reboot-loops to corrupted video playback on users unlucky enough to have the wrong hardware/software combinations.
MS's update testing seems to have gone to hell lately. In many respects, I am quite tempted by the free update to Win 10 Pro I'm eligible for, but the mandatory updates thing (even if Pro lets you defer them for a while) is putting me off. The fact that they stagger how long you can put off the upgrade based on whether you are Enterprise, Pro, Home or "amnesty" (the less favoured you are, the shorter the time you can delay updates) seems a pretty clear indication that MS now sees its customers as beta testers.
To some extent, yes. But I think the worst of the big "rush to freemium" might have passed now. Certainly, traditional gaming companies like EA and Crytek who invested heavily in the model have found the results from it disappointing. Meanwhile, the mobile gaming companies like King who made it big on the back of mobile mega-hits have found it difficult to replicate the success of their big-name games and are generally downsizing.
There are parts of the industry where freemium is working; League of Legends, which has a particularly benign version of the model, is a huge success and will remain so for the foreseeable future. A few failing MMOs, such as Lord of the Rings Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic have managed to extend their lives by moving partially or fully to a freemium model. But in general, the pendulum in most of the gaming world seems to be swinging away from freemium right now (though sadly, buy-to-own games with pay-to-win elements like Forza 5 don't seem to be going away). The mobile gaming ecosystems are not in a happy place due to over-saturation of the markets and low standards, which console and PC gamers have gotten a bit savvier over the last couple of years and have generally realised that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The exceptions to all of this are in Asia. Much of Japan's gaming industry is rapidly decoupling from the wider global industry (Sony, Nintendo and, to a lesser extent, Square-Enix being the exceptions). But the only forms of gaming in good health at the moment are childrens' games (primarily buy-to-own and on handheld platforms), otaku games (some freemium, some buy-to-own-but-pay-to-win on home console and handheld platforms) and salaryman/woman-focussed pay-to-win mobile games, designed to be played in short bursts on a commute. The commute is, unfortunately, more or less the only time that a Japanese adult with a full time job has for gaming, given their ridiculous working hours culture, so the freemium model sits more naturally there.
China's the other exception. There's simply less stigma there about buying your way to success and the majority of their online games in particular are explicitly built around the fact that whoever spends the most on in-game items will have a huge advantage in the game. Everybody there seems to be ok with that (likely for a massively complicated web of social and cultural factors), but it makes my blood run cold.
It was the autoplaying video-adverts that flipped me over (about 6 months ago). I tolerated them when they first appeared, but once they defaulted to having the sound switched on, it was clear that the situation had gone beyond reasonable bounds.
The advertising industry should do whatever it can to make life unpleasant for those companies that rolled out those noisy monsters. I was prepared to tolerate ads up to that point, so that particular development has cost the industry a good few ad-views (and I doubt I'm alone in having found the game of "which browser tab is making the noise" to be my breaking point).
The grinding out of expansions was part of what lost me. Having all progress essentially reset every time a new expansion came out took away a lot of the "persistent world" thing that MMOs are supposed to do. A faster expansion cycle will do nothing to solve that problem, unless they stop raising the level cap (which they won't).
WoW does seem to be in rapid decline now; there's even talk that its player numbers could cross-over with Final Fantasy XIV's at some point in the next 12 months, which would be the first time in a decade that WoW would not have been the largest subscription MMO in the world.
Personally, I dabbled with vanilla played hardcore from early TBC through to late Lich King and came back casual for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I was driven out of hardcore raiding partly by the time-commitment and partly by the constant fucking around with classes and specs by Blizzard, sometimes for multiplayer balance (which I didn't give a shit about) and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. It took any sense of player-agency out of the game. I was driven out of casual play by the massive, overwhelming grind of tedious daily quests that Pandaria used to gate off access to even its casual-oriented endgame content.
I never bought Warlords and, from what I've heard from my one acquaintance who still plays, I missed next to nothing.
WoW won't "die" any time soon. Chances are, Blizzard will still be able to keep it profitable at 500,000 players, if they scale back their investment in development. But if Blizzard want to achieve MMO dominance again, they need an entirely new product now. WoW may not be dying, but it is yesterday's news. Even if you want a straightforward, traditional MMO, Square-Enix are just more competent at delivering that these days.